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If you do not question the DVI output, will not have any problem with this monitor/tv.

The Aoc is a great brand, more dedicated in the business of monitors, is what made me have confidence in buying this product.When I bought did not have much knowledge about the technical specifications.The monitor is good, and meets the requirements for running games, watching television and handle your computer with quality.However, I was somewhat disappointed with the DVI output of it, very poor quality, instead of improving, the colors weresomewhat strange. I searched on forums about this problem, and realized that there were many people with the same problem.But not got rid of the monitor because it just compensating for all other requirements.For the price, the size, the quality of the image (without using DVI).It really pays the amount paid, as the TV picture it is good because it has audio outputs on RCA, headphone jack, and even has its own speakers that have a very acceptable quality.

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An amazing monitor with a few niggles.

I am using the e2343f right now to write this review, and what can I say, it has a wonderful display. Before this monitor, I encountered cheap TVs and monitors which were only 480p or 720p maximum, and were usually 18" or less, so this offering from AOC is truly a sigh of relief.

Gaming in particular is a joy on this monitor, with FPS games offering a wide expansion of my fov, and strategy games becoming wide and extensive on this monitor. I had to battle and struggle with previous monitors, but the AOC monitor is much better and requires a lot less of fiddling as it is ready to plug in and use.

I would however be cautious, when I first installed the e2343f, I experienced several dead pixels and had to promptly reset the AOC and configure it to fix the dead pixel problem. However, I am fairly confident that the AOC is a great machine otherwise and is not indicative of the overall experience of the AOC.

I purchased my AOC at PC World, but it was because of a sale and I managed to pick it up for £125, so I would definitely scout out a bargain for the AOC e2343f, as it is relatively cheap for the crystal clear LED display and could be picked up at a cut-price, also check out Amazon and see if it is available at a bargain price there.

To conclude, the AOC 2343f is a clear winner in my book, and is perfect for gaming, casual browsing or even word processing, and also has a long shelf life, albeit you may experience some problems, but this is unlikely.

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'Lucky', in so much as I didn't have to buy a whole new PC, but badly timed in so much as with Christmas coming, the last thing I wanted to do was shell out on any other electrical goods at all.

My PC had started taking what appeared to be 30 minutes to boot up, witnessed by the fact that the existing monitor's light refused to come on until about half an hour was up, and even then only after much prompting with random key presses and mouse movements. It all seemed to be leading up to the 'my PC is going really slowly' syndrome which seems to bedevil countless computers these days. Then I realised that it should still have been possible to raise the monitor's on-screen hardware menu if nothing else. This didn't work, so it was with some sense of relief that I came to the conclusion that I only wanted a new monitor to replace my now 8-year-old Proview 17" flat screen.

Perusal of the dreaded PC World (yes, why is it that everything in my body tells me not to go, but I still end up there?) was quite promising - well they do have a lot of stock on show. It seemed that for less than I paid last time, (Ain't it always the way?), the replacement was going to be bigger, slimmer and wider, cheaper to run and with more connection options.

The selection process didn't go much further than 'hmmmm.....£139 eh? Cheaper than last time. Looks nice, good picture too. In stock, eh? OK, I'll have one!" and that's how I came by an AOC e2343F flat screen monitor, all 23 diagonal inches of it. Consult an opinion site? Me? AOC? Admiral Overseas Corporation - go figure.

Having since done some digging around, it seems that I've bought 'the latest model' for once, it having only been released to the press of 12th October 2010.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Packaging is good, and recyclable where possible using 'egg box' material but why do Far Eastern manufacturers (this one's Taiwanese) insist on putting those stupid tubular plastic bags on something as robust as a mains lead? Worse still, you unthread numerous wire ties to get the bag off, only to find that the lead is also tied with wire.

Being a very slim panel (only 1.29 cm thick!), power feeds are low voltage from a mains adapter with the usual 'electric kettle' mains plug, and a VGA lead is supplied. Anyone wishing to make use of the digital DVI connection will need to get their own cable. (I did, and it was just a couple of quid on e-Bay)

I understand why they cover these things in a polythene film coating, and removing it is almost quite pleasant, a bit like bursting bubble wrap, but it's a bit annoying, have set the screen up to work in earnest to find bits of torn film you can only get at with tweezers around the base.

There's a distinct 'Samsung' air about this screen, it having a glossy black but slim surround - the phrase 'dust magnet' comes to mind! Overall, thanks to the fact that it's half an inch deep, it is rather elegant. Cable entry is to the back of the base, so there are no visible wires to vault the void between desk and screen and cable entry is horizontal enabling it to lie flat

SET UP?

Yes, there is one.

OK, most PCs will take a generic monitor on board with little trouble, but without installing the drivers that came with the screen, there's a danger you could actually damage it. This is probably the one area in which software can damage hardware, as you may set too high a refresh rate in an effort to make flicker imperceptible. To do so could age the screen prematurely or even kill it there and then. In my experience, 60 Hertz is (or is it '60 Hertz are'?) plenty for restful viewing.

Being a very large screen, well it is from the usual distance, I was able to set the maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, this being the nearest equivalent to 16:9, although I'd swear that the screen's 505 mm by 285 mm was wider than that. So much so that I whipped out a calculator to confirm I was wrong!

Along with drivers, the installation CD comes with 3 utilities.

1. E-Saver. Yeah, yeah, I know, sounds like a Cash ISA, very funny, but it does have one thing in common - very little interest for me (geddit?), or so I thought. At first I couldn't really see what this did, thinking that it monitored time on standby and gave you a pat on the back for saving one billionth of a gram of CO2 getting into the air. However, now that I've discovered it needs setting to 'English' first rather than an oriental language for which I don't have a font, I see that it's a means of tweaking such things as what you want it to do when the PC sleeps or is turned off. There are certain benefits to this. For example having your hardware display its own screen saver is more economical on 'juice' than letting Windows do it, which let's face it is more to do with preventing screen 'burn-in' than saving the planet.

2. i-Menu. This is really a software version of the hardware menu for setting up width, colours etc.

3. Screen+. This enables the screen to be several 'virtual screens' within its own confines. For the life of me, I don't envisage having a use for this.

USING IT

First impressions from using it ranged from an emotive "My God, isn't it w-i-d-e?" as I scanned my head from side to side just to take it all in to a more tempered or possibly even slightly nerdy "Heh, I can see the first 26 columns of an Excel spreadsheet!"

Once you've got a display resolution that's in a 16:9 ratio set within your PC, you need never look at a stretched image of 'Hoppy, The Wide-Mouthed Frog' again. It's probably worth whipping out a pocket calculator for this, as many resolution options are still in a 4:3 ratio.

This actual document I'm typing initially still looked normal in MS Word, albeit with rather a lot of margin either side. However, once it burgeoned into its second page, Word then decided to show me my first two pages, side by side, with the tops of the next ones also showing as the verbal diarrhoea set in! Very useful.

Web sites vary. Ciao expands to make maximum use of the width whereas here at Dooyoo it doesn't - nor does my on-line bank, the latter preferring to huddle in the top left corner as if suffering from digital agoraphobia (isn't that a fear of taking your finger out, Chris?).

One thing that doesn't look quite right is the JPEG we've chosen as our wallpaper. No amount of playing with the settings of this 14:9 photo from my Nikon D90 will make it look right. It doesn't look too bad, and most landscapes would be fine but the Icelandic horses on mine were looking look decidedly 'Thelwellian'. In the end, I opted to make a special 'on-screen' version by cropping an approximate 16:9 patch from the original, and saving that for use as wallpaper.

The screen colours are just right, and to be honest I haven't had to alter any defaults except that I found it a tad bright to start off with, so I chose 'Movie' mode which stopped it shrieking at me!

It's evenly lit to all four corners and free of any 'barrel' or 'pincushion' distortion. Unlike previous monitors, I haven't had to make any adjustments to centre the image or make it fit the screen Viewing angles, always a bone of contention with flat screen panels, are good at around 170° in the horizontal (i.e. from side to side) and 160° in the vertical. For a single user with the screen angled at 90° to his eyes, none of this matters, but you do notice as you settle into your seat that the colour only develops full intensity at your normal viewing angle, which is why there's a generous range of adjustment to the base, notwithstanding the fact that this is a legal requirement for office use.

It has power-saving accolades coming out of its ears, and the base is also useful as a wall mount, although the connecting leads are a bit too short to do anything particularly wonderful with (like hide them), in that respect.

The AOC new range embodies what they call 'Razor LED'; well at least unlike Motorola, they left the vowels in! For the technically-minded, it is an LED back-lit LCD monitor, not the more common multi-LCD, with a contrast ratio of 5,000,000:1. I take it that means that it's 'whites' are 50 million times brighter than its 'blacks'.

Full power consumption, claimed to be half that of equivalent-sized screens is a very commendable 25 watts with standby-power practically off the lower end of the scale, but all of my appliances get shut off automatically when my PC shuts down so it could be the Hadron* Collider on standby for all I care.

(By the way, do you find that nuclear physicists really give you a hadron?)

The DVI connector is compatible with, and connectable to an HDMI source, except that it only carries vision not sound, so you could use it as an HD TV monitor as long as your sound was fed through another amplifier.

GLAD I GOT IT?

Well, for something I was forced into buying, it's doing well and for £139, it seems a lot of monitor, with a good quality picture.